What If Hunter Biden Were Hunter Jones? The Meaning of Quid Pro Quo

So what’s with this Latin beast? Literally, it means an exchange of one thing for another, where each of these acts is contingent on the other. In other words, if the party of the first part does not actually follow through with the offer, the party of the second part is not obligated to do so either, and the parties are interchangeable.

To put this in a more common vernacular, these three words in English, “tit for tat” convey the meaning of the three words in Latin under discussion. Other such expressions include "if you scratch my back, I'll scratch yours" and "one hand washes the other".

Some commentators think the phrase designates an exchange of commodities of similar value. But this is mistaken. The market value of Joe’s house is now $100,000. Pete offers to purchase it for double that amount. Only the latter knows that the proverbial railroad is coming through, and will pay much more than that. There is no roughly equivalent value, here. The house is worth much more to the buyer than the seller. But this is still a case, a paradigm case of the quid quo pro.

This arrangement applies to every single commercial arrangement in the economy. You purchase a pair of shoes. You will not cough up the money unless the seller actually hands over this good to you. For his part, he refuses to part with his property unless and until to follow through with the payment you agreed upon.

This all seems pretty innocuous. Why, then, is the quid quo pro pretty much dominating the news, nowadays? This is because, sometimes, there is a distinctively foul odor accompanying such exchanges.

A professor tells a student: if you go to bed with me, I’ll give you an A in the course; if not, you’ll get an F. That’s a pretty nasty quid quo pro. Should all such offers be banned by law? No. It all depends upon the property rights involved. Suppose that same professor started up a university of his own. He was front and center about his purposes: he wants to enhance his sex life. He calls his new emporium Quid Quo Pro University. He even has banners and sweatshirts made up extolling the virtues of QQPU. Its primary policy: if you have sexual intercourse with the college president (he promoted himself from being a mere professor), you get an A, if not, you fail all the courses. Will many students enroll in this university? To ask this is to answer it: of course not. But that is beside the point. The point is, did he violate any law a freedom oriented person ought to respect? No, again. This was, rather, a paradigm case of sex between consenting adults.

What then was wrong with the offer he initially made to his students? He was stealing property from his employer! He had no right to offer to exchange a course grade for sexual services; his employer greatly looked askance at all such proposals.

We conclude there is nothing amiss with the quid quo pro per se. Its invalidity, if there is any, resides solely in whether or not the initiator of the exchange is the legitimate owner of the good offered. In the case of the professor, he was not; when he became the president of the university, and its sole owner, all was well, at least insofar as the law is concerned; we abstract from morality in this analysis.

What about President Trump engaging in a quid quo pro with his counterpart in the Ukraine? Whether this was a quid quo pro arrangement or not is irrelevant. The issue, the only issue, is whether or not he has a right to ask Volodymyr Zelensky to help determine the innocence or guilt of Hunter Biden. It is difficult to see why he did not. Yes, yes, this would help his re-election chances. So what. Suppose, instead, Trump asked Zelensky to check the bona fides of Hunter Jones. Would that have been a violation of law? Not at all. Just because Joe Biden would suffer from this request should be deemed irrelevant.

Walter E. Block, Ph.D is the Harold E. Wirth Eminent Scholar Endowed Chair and Professor of Economics at Loyola University, New Orleans.

The author to whom this piece is attributed IS a real person (Wikipedia). Visits to several fact checker sites for his name produced NOTHING!
If what this man has written is even half true (and my research indicates it’s ALL true), he’d better beef up his security or avoid buying green bananas.
Every citizen needs to see this. If they remain Democrats and/or support this guy for POTUS or object to as thorough an ANAL PROBING as they’ve given Trump, they need to be institutionalized.
DB
PS: Anyone still think obozo, pelosi, schiff, etc. were NOT in the Ukraine honey pot?

A TRUSTED, INFORMED FRIEND SENT ME THIS TODAY.

IT IS AMAZING, BUT NOT SURPRISING.

IF ENTIRELY ACCURATE.

JOE BIDEN’S RECORD OF CORRUPTION

For decades Joe Biden has used his political position to enrich his family.

Joe Biden has a brother and one living son. Consider:

1. During the US occupation of Iraq, while Biden was Vice President, the
construction firm Hillstone International, which employed brother James as
executive vice president, received a $1.5 billion US Government contract for
construction of buildings in Iraq. James had no experience in construction or in Iraq — having only joined the construction firm the previous year.

2. In 1996, fresh out of law school. Hunter Biden was given a $100,000 position on the board of one of Joe’s largest donors, MBNA bank, while he was also his father’s campaign manager. Eventually Hunter became the bank’s senior vice president. Joe Biden was jokingly referred to as “the senator from MBNA”. He famously supported legislation to protect MBNA from credit card-related bankruptcy filings.

3. Biden’s son Hunter is a recovering cocaine addict who has been in and out of rehab. Yet Biden used his clout as Vice President in 2013 to get Hunter a special exception to become an officer in the US Navy. Hunter was

cashiered from the Navy for cocaine use in 2014.

4. In 2009 one of Hunter’s companies received $130 million in federal bailout loan money via the Term Asset-Backed Securities Loan Facility,or TALF. The payments began three weeks after the incorporation of Hunter’s company. Joe Biden supported the TALF program, delaying his 2009 resignation as senator just before taking office as Vice President to cast his final vote to increase TALF funding.

5. As President Obama’s point man for China, Vice President Biden flew to
China to lead trade negotiations, taking his son with him on Air Force
Two. Ten days after negotiations concluded and he and his father returned to America, Hunter’s private equity firm, shared with John Kerry’s stepson and a Chinese partner called Rosemont-Seneca-Bohai, received contracts totaling some $1.5 billion, Hunter’s take from this deal would have been some $20 million.

Joe Biden was attacked in the media for negotiating a trade deal too favorable to China. Bohai has since been revealed to be an arm of the Bank of China, heavily influenced by the Chinese military. Rosemont-Seneca-Bohai has invested some of the Chinese money in buying a US company which controls significant defense-related information and made several deals involving dual-use technology, all of which were approved by the government while Joe Biden was Vice President.

6. As Obama’s point man for Ukraine, Joe Biden was directly involved with
issues of corruption in a country notorious for same. Following an election in Ukraine, the energy company Burisma came under serious investigation for corruption. In April 2014, Hunter Biden was named to the Burisma board. Three days later, Joe Biden announced plans for the US to buy some $50 million in gas from Ukraine. Burisma is the largest gas producer in that country. The deal was so clearly Dirty that Chris Heinz, Kerry’s stepson, ended his business relationship with Hunter.

Ukrainian State Prosecutor Viktor Shokin continued the investigation of
Burisma. Shokin was widely regarded as corrupt. Ukrainian authorities raided the home of the Burisma owner. Three weeks later Burisma officials met with State Department officials, including Secretary Kerry, using Hunter Biden’s name and urging the United States to get Ukraine to call off the dogs.

In mid-2016, Joe Biden met with senior Ukrainian officials, threatening to withhold $1 billion in aid funds if they did not fire Shokin within six hours. Shokin was fired. Hunter was still on the Burisma Board and that firm is still under Ukrainian investigation. Biden claims that he was simply carrying out US policy in demanding Shokin’s removal but the conflict of interest is obvious, which may have involved bribery and extortion by Biden.

The pattern is clear: the Biden family history is corrupt. To suggest, as House Democrats and their allies in the media have, that Joe Biden cannot be investigated for any of this due to his presidential candidacy — while simultaneously impeaching Donald Trump for alleged similar activity —is to hypocritically cover up scandal and possible crimes.

Stanley T. Escudero
Ambassador of the United States (retired)

December 5, 2019

Revealed: Joe Biden twice used his position as senator to intervene to boost son Hunter’s lobbying
Joe Biden lobbied Department of Justice Congress and Homeland Security for Hunter’s lobbying clients
BY Alana Goodman, Washington Examiner| October 24, 2019 07:37 PM

Joe Biden privately contacted the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Justice when he was a senior and influential U.S. senator to discuss issues that his son Hunter’s firm was being paid to lobby on, according to government records.

On at least two occasions, Biden contacted federal departments to discuss issues related to Hunter’s firm’s lobbying clients, according to records reviewed by the Washington Examiner.

Biden’s behind-the-scenes outreach illustrates how his Senate work overlapped with his son’s business interests. Biden has faced scrutiny for taking actions that were perceived to benefit his son’s work, including calling for the firing of a Ukrainian prosecutor and backing policies that helped the Delaware-based credit card industry while Hunter was working for MBNA, which is headquartered in the state.

Government records show that Biden, who has always insisted he knows nothing about his son’s business activities, helped Hunter’s work with strategic and highly specific interventions that could have benefited his son to the tune of tens of thousands of dollars.

On Feb. 28, 2007, Biden contacted DHS to express that he was “concerned about the Department’s proposed chemical security regulations authorized by Section 550 of DHS Appropriations Act of 2007,” according to the department’s log of its contacts with members of Congress.

Section 550, which was passed in 2006 as part of the DHS appropriations bill, requires high-risk chemical plants to submit site safety plans to DHS for approval, including security credentialing and training for employees.

Eight weeks earlier, the Industrial Safety Training Council had hired Hunter Biden’s firm to lobby DHS on the issue. The trade group, which represents companies that provide safety training for chemical facility employees, was mounting a heavy lobbying campaign over section 550, submitting congressional testimony about the need to expand background checks for chemical plant employees.

The Industrial Safety Training Council was seeking to expand the “language in DHS legislation regarding security clearance and credentialing for chemical facility employees and employers” in January 2007, according to lobbying disclosure records.

While Hunter Biden did not register as an individual lobbyist for the trade association, he was one of three senior partners in his firm at the time. The Industrial Safety Training Council paid Oldaker, Biden & Belair a total of $200,000 between early 2007 and the end of 2008.

The Biden campaign did not respond to request for comment. The National Legal and Policy Center, a government watchdog group, said Biden should have avoided involvement with issues that his son’s firm was also lobbying on because of the appearance of conflict.

“It’s implausible Sen. Biden did not know his son’s firm was lobbying on this arcane issue,” said Tom Anderson, the director of NLPC’s Government Integrity Project.
“Sometimes appearances are exactly what they are,” he said. “This is a recurring problem we’ve seen on the Hill, where family members are enriched because of their relationship with a member.”

Biden also sent a letter to U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales on Jan. 31, 2007 requesting a meeting with the Department of Justice to discuss expanding the federal fingerprint background check system.

“I write to request your assistance in implementing an expanded background check system for our nation’s volunteer organizations,” wrote Biden. “If we can work together to expand the number of volunteer organizations that have access to fast, accurate, and inexpensive fingerprint background checks, we will make significant and important strides in our ongoing effort to protect kids across our country.”

Biden added, “I would like to convene a small meeting with key representatives” from DOJ, the FBI, members of Congress and volunteer groups.

One of Hunter’s firm’s lobbying clients at the time, a coalition of state-level criminal justice advocates called SEARCH, was also lobbying the federal government for a broader fingerprint screening system at the time.

The same day as Biden’s letter, SEARCH adopted a resolution calling on Congress to consider “any effort to improve the quality, completeness and accessibility of criminal history records” and expand the current system to “allow the return of all criminal history record information maintained by the States on the search subject through a single fingerprint check.”

The group initially hired Oldaker, Biden & Belair in 2006 to lobby for federal funding for state-level criminal justice programs, paying the firm $114,000 over the next year. In early 2008, SEARCH was seeking funding “to assist states in development and use of information to accelerate automation of fingerprint authentication processes and criminal justice data which are compatible with the FBI’s” system, according to lobbying records.

Biden introduced a bill called the “Child Protection Improvements Act” on March 13, 2008, which created a national fingerprint background check system for volunteer groups that worked with children. Oldaker, Biden & Belair promptly began lobbying for the bill on behalf of their client, SEARCH, according to lobbying records. SEARCH paid the firm $93,000 in 2008, records show.

Hunter Biden founded Oldaker, Biden & Belair with William Oldaker, a former adviser to his father. During his time at the firm, he was registered to lobby for clients on issues ranging from online gambling to higher education. After Biden became a vice presidential candidate in 2008, Hunter stepped away from lobbying, and the firm was renamed Oldaker, Belair & Wittie.

ABC News reported last week that Biden was concerned conflicts with his son’s lobbying work could negatively affect his presidential run in 2008.

Biden was “concerned with the impact that Hunter’s lobbying activities might have on his expected campaign for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination,” according to court documents filed by a former business partner of Hunter Biden’s in 2007, ABC News reported.
“Because my dad was vice president of the United States, there’s literally nothing, as a young man or as a full-grown adult, that my father in some way hasn’t had influence over,” Hunter told the outlet in an interview.

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/politics/biden-outreach-to-dhs-and-doj-overlapped-with-work-by-son-hunters-lobbying-firm

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